Slovenian Tarok is the family’s precision game for three or four players; Strawman (Strohmandeln) is its dedicated 2 player tarock. Both are control games with little room to blame the cards: Slovenia prices every contract exactly and keeps a signed ledger, while Strawman lays half the deck face up and lets the better planner win. Chairs usually decide this one, and either room is well served.
At first glance, then, this pairing settles itself by counting chairs. But under the different table sizes sits a shared temperament that sets these two apart from their louder cousins: low chaos, high consequence, and very little room for excuses. If that made you sit up, one of these is your game; the question is which.
By the numbers
The unit first: a trick is one round where each player plays a card face up and the best card takes them all (new to trick-taking? start here). Slovenia: 3 to 4 players (five with a sitting dealer), 54 cards, 12 tricks per hand, 9 priced contracts, 5 bonus families, all three difficulty dots, 36 of 70 Card Points for most contracts (Card Points are what you capture in tricks), hands feeding a session score to 200. Strawman: 2 players, the same 54 cards all in play, 15-card hands plus three four-card piles each, 27 two-card tricks per hand, 2 contracts, 3 bonuses, one difficulty dot, the same 36 of 70 bar, and a race to 11 Victory Points, the running match score that won hands feed. The contrast in shape is stark: Slovenia’s evening is many medium hands feeding one running column; Strawman’s is fewer, much longer hands, each more than twice a Slovenian hand in tricks, settled one duel at a time.
Two control games, two table sizes
Slovenian Tarok controls through price. Every contract has an exact value on a strict staircase; taking fewer cards from the talon (the face-down reserve dealt aside) raises it; winning by a wider distance pays better. The scoring ledger is signed and one-sided: only the Declarer’s side, the bid winner’s, ever writes, up for victories, down in ink for failures. Mastery means knowing, before you bid, what your hand is worth to the point. The game is a hundred years of competitive polish, and Slovenia plays it as its national card game, clubs and championships included.
Strawman controls through information. Two players, big hands, and between you the face-up Straw Men piles whose top cards you play as if from your hand. Every spent table card flips a new one. Most of the game is visible; what is not visible is deducible; and so nearly every result traces back to a decision you made. Where Slovenia prices your judgment, Strawman exposes it.
Klop and Trischaken: the shared negative contracts
Both games keep a contract for the hand nobody wants. In Strawman, when both players pass, the hand becomes Trischaken, an everyone-loses scramble where you race to capture as little as possible. Slovenia’s klop is the same beautiful idea grown teeth: everyone plays alone, every Card Point captured is damage, with a bonus for capturing nothing and a bust for capturing too much. If you enjoy the inverted world where good cards become bad news, both games deliver it; klop is the deluxe version.
Bonuses live in both, and both let the whole table earn them. Strawman adds a bluffing wrinkle: score a bonus silently, or announce it for double and paint a target on it. Slovenia adds a financial one: bonuses announced by the Declarer’s side swell the same signed column that a failed contract carves.
The practical divide
Beyond chairs, it is stakes versus intimacy. A Slovenian evening is a campaign: your column accumulates, the closing rounds approach, and the last hands carry real tension. A Strawman match, traditionally raced to 11 Victory Points, is a self-contained duel you can finish in one sitting and immediately demand a rematch of.
Both games end in careful counting, and our deck was built for exactly that moment: the Card Points sit printed on the cards as pips, so you count the pile you see instead of reciting a memorized table, which keeps even a contested Slovenian distance civil. And in Strawman’s open board, where you constantly read ranks across the table, the direction arrows on the number pips quietly solve the red suits’ reversed ranking before it ever becomes a rules argument.
Which one is for you?
Choose Slovenian Tarok if you have three or four players and want the family’s most precise competitive engine: prices, distances, and a ledger that makes every evening a story with a score.
Choose Strawman if you and one other person want the family’s purest test of planning: an open battlefield, a turning market of cards, and results you own completely.
And if your household is two on weekdays and four on weekends, this is not a choice at all. It is a schedule.
If your table looks different: four players wanting Slovenia’s depth with more contract variety should read our Calling the King vs Slovenian Tarok comparison. A pair who wants more noise than Strawman’s quiet duel can recruit two friends and start with Calling the Twenty, the family’s presorted first game. And six or more players belong at Dappen’s long table. Every pairing is at all fifteen comparisons.
Quick answers
What is Trischaken in Strawman? The everyone-loses contract that begins when both players pass, where you race to capture as little as possible.
Can Slovenian Tarok be played by two? No; it wants three or four players, and Strawman is the family’s two-player answer with the same deck.
Both games, and four more, are taught from zero in the Tarok Exploration Book, played with one deck.